TV Shows Like Netflix's The Perfect Couple

Netflix's The Perfect Couple is the first big hit of the fall season, a twisty limited series murder mystery about a rich family whose wedding of the summer is canceled due to MURDER. Nicole Kidman stars as Greer Winbury, a successful author married to the well-to-do Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber) who lives in the exclusive beachside community of Nantucket. Their son Benji (Billy Howle) is set to marry Amelia (Eve Hewson), but the body of Amelia's maid of honor washes up on shore after the rehearsal dinner, turning everyone into a suspect and wasting a lot of pre-ordered fresh oysters. 

if you tore through the six-episode series and want more naughty shenanigans from people who can afford eight houses, we've put together a list of shows featuring the hallmarks of The Perfect Couple, including dysfunctional families, corpses, husbands who are cheating dogs, twisty mysteries, and the queen of TV shows like this, Nicole Kidman. 

You're going to see a lot of shows starring Nicole Kidman on this list, and not just because she's the star of The Perfect Couple, but because she's found her TV niche as the perfect rich person adjacent to murder. It all started in 2017 with HBO's Big Little Lies, which almost every other show on this list owes its life to. The adaptation of Liane Moriarty's page-turner follows wealthy women in Monterey, Calif., all tied together through a murder involving one of their partners. It won a bunch of awards thanks to the star power in its cast, which includes Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, Alexander Skarsgård, and Adam Scott. Though initially launched as a limited series, its success forced HBO to order a second season, which probably shouldn't have happened, though it did add Meryl Streep to the ensemble.

Picture this: Wealthy people gather in an idyllic location; then a murder happens. That's the basis of The Perfect Couple, and it's exactly how every season of The White Lotus starts, too. Creator Mike White's anthology — another Emmy winner for HBO — examines classism by following the patrons and employees of high-end resorts in exotic locales (Hawai'i, Italy, Thailand) and showing how they interact and how the power dynamics can shift. And like The Perfect Couple, it's all mixed with infidelity, shocking reveals, and suspicious motives for murder, with an all-star cast that includes Connie Britton, Jennifer Coolidge, Sydney Sweeney, Michael Imperioli, and The Perfect Couple's Meghann Fahy. It's one of the better shows on this list.

Nicole Kidman and HBO teamed up again in 2020 with The Undoing, a limited series thriller in which Kidman played another wealthy wife embroiled in a situation where a dead body shows up. This time, she's Grace, a psychologist and mother who crosses paths with a beautiful, enigmatic woman named Elena (Matilda De Angelis). But when that woman is found — wait for it — murdered, the list of suspects grows, headlined by Grace's doctor husband, Jonathan (Hugh Grant), who suddenly disappears when the cops come sniffing around. Awfully suspicious, Hugh! Susanne Bier, who directed and produced The Perfect Couple, also produced and directed The Undoing. There is no bizarre opening dance number in The Undoing's opening credits, however.

If your requirement for what to watch next after The Perfect Couple is merely "rich family gets disrupted by murder," then immediately go binge The Staircase, a Nicole Kidman-free HBO limited series based on the landmark 2004 true crime docuseries of the same name. Colin Firth stars as Michael Peterson, a novelist in Durham, North Carolina, who became the prime suspect in his wife Kathleen's (Toni Collette) death after she supposedly fell down a staircase in their palatial home. The accusations eat at the family, including their children, while dysfunction and infidelity erode their relationships in a timeline before Kathleen's death. What makes The Staircase more than just a titillating murder drama is its self-referential theme on documentaries and reality television as a French film crew gets Michael's side of the story, and its thorough examination of all the theories in this puzzling real-world case. (OWLS!?!?) As far as great shows in this genre, this would be my first recommendation.

Hear me out! This goofy drama about lifelong friends played by Scrubs' Sarah Chalke and Grey's Anatomy's Katherine Heigl might not seem like it has a lot of crossover with The Perfect Couple, but one of the joys of The Perfect Couple is its very imperfect writing, acting, and storytelling. Firefly Lane is dripping with that vibe, opting for schlocky melodrama to propel its themes of friendship, romance, and — yes — tragedy. If you watched The Perfect Couple for its perplexing dialogue (what the heck does "Broken Doggy" even mean?) and confusing timelines, Firefly Lane has all that amplified by a power of 100, making it hard to tear your eyes away even as your brain screams to turn it off. 

Nicole Kidman's written-in-blood contract with HBO may require her to play a troubled wife, but when she's working for Hulu, she can play a Russian wellness retreat director, apparently. In the limited series (which became unlimited when it was renewed for a second season) Nine Perfect Strangers, based on yet another Liane Moriarty book, Kidman's Masha Dmitrichenko hosts several people at her health resort in California, where she, unbeknownst to her guests, doses them with psychedelics and sets their truths free. It doesn't work out all nice and tidy, of course, but the central mystery of what exactly is going on and who Masha really is might keep you going. The great cast includes Bobby Cannavale, Regina Hall, Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, and Manny Jacinto.

The show on this list that shares the most DNA with The Perfect Couple is Peacock's Apples Never Fall, a 2024 drama based on a book by Liane Moriarty, the author of Big Little Lies. Once again we have another well-to-do family, this time hit with the mysterious disappearance of matriarch Joy, played by Annette Bening. When her husband (Sam Neill) becomes a suspect, their four adult children re-examine whether their parents' relationship was as perfect as it seemed. (Spoiler: No.) Adding to the mystery is a stranger who spends time with the family before Joy's disappearance and plays a key part in the twisty ending. Although Apples Never Fall is similar to The Perfect Couple, be warned: It's not a good show, and it merely exists as Peacock's misguided attempt to crash the genre.

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